Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (93 page)

In fact, there is no record of any personal contact between Beethoven and Tiedge after this summer, and nothing else seemed to endure from the trip. No opera libretto appeared; in this period Beethoven said no to some dozen librettos submitted to him.
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Meanwhile he and his new helpmate Oliva had a violent quarrel, which Varnhagen reported left the younger man “deeply depressed.” They were soon reconciled and talked about going to England together—of which nothing came.
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The next meeting between Beethoven and Varnhagen was a couple of years later, in Vienna. On that occasion the writer found his demigod surly, unsociable, hostile toward the aristocracy, even uncouth, and declined to take him to see Rahel. Varnhagen would not have known that by that point Beethoven had suffered another failure in love, the worst yet.
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If Beethoven was ailing in 1811, however, his letters show a surprising lightness of spirit. His puckish imagination and rampant irony were running high. In a letter to Zmeskall, after a smeared line he finishes, “We make you a present of a few
inkblots
.”
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He wrote publisher Härtel another compendious letter, making excuses for
Christus
but trying to sell it anyway, and complained as usual about “those wretched r,” meaning “reviewers”—he refused to write the word—who praised “the most contemptible bunglers.” He ends with this sardonic melody: “You
can't
go on re-re-re-re-re-vi-vi-ew-ew-ew-ew-ing-ing
to all eternity, that you can't do
.”
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In the same letter he takes back the intended dedication of the Mass in C to Bettina Brentano, since “the lady is now married.” It came out dedicated to Prince Kinsky, who had finally paid up his part of the stipend enhanced to account for inflation.

In one respect the Teplitz spa had its intended effect; for the moment, Beethoven felt healthier than he had in some time. He wrote Zmeskall in late October, “My feet are better, and the maker of the feet [presumably God] has promised the maker of the head [himself] a sound foot in eight days at latest.”
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The maker of the foot did not oblige.

 

On leaving Teplitz Beethoven visited Prince Lichnowsky at his estate in Graz, scene of their break five years earlier that had never completely healed. The once-lusty and -domineering Lichnowsky was failing, it was rumored from venereal disease. He had less than three years to live.
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In nearby Troppeau Beethoven directed a performance of the Mass in C, of which he remained fond even if the world did not embrace it. After the mass he improvised on organ for a half hour—one of his last public performances. At the end of the year he wrote several versions of the lyric “An die Geliebte” (To the Beloved), perhaps with Antonie Brentano in mind: one version had an optional guitar part; she played the instrument.
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It was the next spring when he gave the manuscript of one version to Antonie at her request. In it the poet imagines kissing a tear from his beloved's cheek, exclaiming, “[N]ow your sorrows are also mine!” To what extent this song, short in time but long in passion, was a testament of love for Antonie or only of empathy with that woman of constant sorrows is another of the mysteries of these days.

Back in Vienna he started his singing parties again, hoping for inspiration toward vocal works, and began sketching ideas for three new symphonies. On one page he jotted, “Freude schöner Götter Funken Tochter aus Elysium. Detached fragments, like princes are beggars, etc., not the whole . . . Detached fragments from Schiller Freude brought together in a whole.” Nearby in the sketchbook is a try at a melody for
An die Freude
and a note about a “Sinfonia in D moll.”
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So as of the turn of 1812 he was sketching what within the year became the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and what more than a decade later became the Ninth Symphony in D minor, which treats
An die Freude
just as he describes. These three symphonies amounted to the most ambitious slate of work he had planned in years.

But the work would never be unimpeded. The hopeful upturn in his health at Teplitz did not last. In November, he begged off a lesson with Archduke Rudolph, saying, “I was suddenly struck down by such a fever that I completely lost consciousness; an injured foot may have partly caused this feeling of faintness.”
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By now the foot infection, or whatever it was, had been torturing him for nearly a year.

Yet his creative energy was running relatively high, and also his kindness. This winter he began an extended correspondence with lawyer Joseph von Varena, whom he had met in Teplitz. Varena asked Beethoven for works to be done at charity concerts he was giving in Graz. Beethoven responded with great generosity and kept it up for years, donating to charities in Graz a stream of scores in print and manuscript.
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“From my earliest childhood,” he wrote Varena, “my zeal to serve our poor suffering humanity in any way whatsoever by means of my art has made no compromise with any lower motive . . . the only reward I have asked for was the feeling of inward happiness which always attends such actions.”
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The Graz charity concert of December 1811 included the
Choral Fantasy;
a seventeen-year-old pianist named Marie Koschak, whom Beethoven had recommended, scored a triumph with the solo part.
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In February the hastily assembled music for Kotzebue's
King Stephan
and
The Ruins of Athens
premiered with the plays in Pest. In comparison to its fellow quick productions such as
Christus
am ­Ölberge
and
Prometheus
, this theater music seems closer to being truly Beethovenian, like the
Egmont
music. At the same time it was not so far from hackwork, written to please, in keeping with the Hungarian chauvinism of the plays. This theater music presaged a coming period of occasional pieces Beethoven turned out for the money.

In the end, of his more commercial items this music would stand as some of the more appealing, or anyway less notorious. The
Ruins of Athens
Overture is in his rich, fully developed theatrical style. Of the incidental pieces, the choral music is duly and conventionally inspiring, likewise a bass aria begotten by Mozart's Zarastro in
Die Zauberflöte
. There is an over-the-top male chorus that sounds rather like Mozart's Turks in
The Abduction from the Seraglio
singing from the fierce passions of opium. All this music for the “mustachios” of Hungary has a degree of exotic coloration; the evocative sonorities of the overture would have their impact, along with
Coriolan
and
Egmont
, on Romantic overtures and program music for many years to come. Best of all for Beethoven, this music went over nicely with audiences. From the Septet op. 20 onward, his most commercial pieces often turned out to be his most popular.

 

February 1812 also saw the Vienna premiere of the Fifth Piano Concerto, later dubbed
Emperor
, with Carl Czerny soloing. This concerto from 1809, which Beethoven wrote probably knowing he would never play because of his deafness, was not premiered until November 1811, in a Leipzig concert he did not attend. Like its predecessor, the
Emperor
is dedicated to Archduke Rudolph. The majestic quality that earned its name would be credited to the influence of its dedicatee, brother of the emperor. But there were many Beethoven dedications to Rudolph, and their characters range widely.

A more likely reason for the tone of the Fifth Concerto is simply that he had written nothing like it, and he wanted maximum contrast from his output in a given genre. As usual with Beethoven, the
Emperor
lays out its essential character and ideas in the first moments. It is in E-flat major, most often a heroic key for him, and so it is here. (It is his last heroic-style work in E-flat major.) We hear a
fortissimo
chord from the orchestra that summons bravura torrents of notes from the piano. The radical step is less the idea of beginning with the soloist (as he had already done in the Fourth Concerto) than the cadenza-like quality, which will mark much of the solo part (the reason he omits the usual concluding cadenzas). A second towering chord from the orchestra is answered by more heroic peals from the piano, this time sinking to some quiet
espressivo
phrases that foreshadow the second movement.

Only then does the orchestra set out on the leading theme, in a sweeping and imperious military style. By now it's clear that this piece is heroic in tone, symphonic in scope, and
the
hero is the soloist. The opening theme dominates the movement. The appearance of a softly lilting second theme in exotic E-flat minor presages a work marked by unusual key shifts, their effect ranging from startling to mysterious. At the end of the orchestral exposition the soloist returns on a rising chromatic dash that leads to a two-fisted proclamation of his own version of the orchestra's theme. It dissolves into flashing garlands of notes, continuing the endless cadenza in the solo part that persists through the course of an enormous movement.

After an opening more consistently militant in style than in any other Beethoven concerto, the second movement unfolds in a serenely spiritual atmosphere, beginning with an eloquent theme in muted strings that Czerny said was based on pilgrims' hymns. It echoes the quiet
espressivo
phrases of the first movement's opening. In turn, the spirituality of the second movement is punctuated with touches of the soloist's first-movement bravura.

Picking up directly from the end of the slow movement, the rondo finale begins with a lusty, offbeat theme in the piano. Call its tone playfully heroic. As in the first movement, the opening theme dominates. Toward the end, a thrumming martial timpani seems to herald the approach of the final cadenza. But once again there is no cadenza because the soloist has been showing off in a quasi-improvisatory fashion all along. The piece finishes with offbeat exclamations that land on the beat only at the last moment. So ends not the final work in Beethoven's heroic style but one of the last in which he seems to take the heroic mode at face value. He never completed another concerto.

Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
(so often maligned by Beethoven to its owner Härtel), called it “doubtless one of the most original, most inventive, most effective, but also most difficult of all existing concertos,” and reported the audience at the Leipzig premiere to be “in transports of delight” at the end. The Viennese received it without enthusiasm.
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The two premieres, the slighter theater work receiving the most acclaim, ushered in an eventful, in some ways too eventful, year for Beethoven. His fame was secure, his earlier “revolutionary” works had settled into the repertoire, publishers were contending for his work (though not Breitkopf & Härtel anymore). In 1812, he completed the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

It could have been no surprise that in that year sculptor Franz Klein turned up at his door wanting to make a plaster life mask of the famous man. Partly because of the new quasi-science of phrenology—the theory that face and head reveal character, genius, what have you—molding the faces of the great had become fashionable. Goethe, George Washington, Keats, and many others submitted to the procedure. More practically, Klein and other artists wanted an objective record of a subject's “real” face on which to model paintings and sculptures. Klein's enthusiasm for taking casts of his subjects was reflected in his Viennese nickname of “Head Chopper.” The impetus for this particular life mask came from piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher; he had commissioned Klein to make a bust of Beethoven to add to the distinguished company of busts in his private concert hall.

So one day Beethoven found himself lying face-up at an angle, his face and hair soaked in soapy water and oil, protective material covering his eyes, straws stuck up his nose to breathe through, while the Head Chopper slathered a thick mass of reeking wet gypsum over his face. As the procedure went on and on with excruciating slowness, Beethoven became increasingly fearful that he was going to suffocate. Suddenly in a spasm of anger and fear he jerked off the almost-set cast, threw it to the floor, and ran from the room.

The mask shattered into pieces. Klein was able to glue them together and so reconstructed the “true” face of the composer, down to his scars from smallpox or whatever it was. From there Klein made his soon-famous bust that, with the mask itself, became the model for most portraits of Beethoven from then on. The mask and those ensuing portraits show a small man with a formidable scowl turning down his protruding lips, his chin and brow fiercely clenched, his hair standing nearly on end. That was the image the Romantic world and later ages came to know Beethoven by. It was the face they wanted to see in their geniuses: fierce, bold, defiant, suffering, stormy up to the slant of his hair. So tormented did it look that for the rest of the century, many people assumed it was Beethoven's death mask.

With Klein's life mask and bust, the visual corollary of the Beethoven myth entered the zeitgeist. But no earlier portraits had that look, and neither did later ones done from life by artists who were observing what was actually in front of them, the man rather than the myth. Beethoven did not look like that bust most of the time. Except in his rages, his face was usually impassive, the major animation being in the eyes. The Klein mask and the bust he made from it are not a “real” portrait of a genius. They are the face of a man scowling because he is angry and uncomfortable and frightened.
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Beethoven was perennially annoyed by the peripherals of fame, such as the tribe of artists wanting him to sit still so they could capture his face and his soul—though he sometimes liked the results. But there were more serious things concerning him in 1812. He was still locked in the grip of his ailments, but working on the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. “I have been constantly unwell and extremely busy,” he wrote his new friend Varena in Graz, offering him the first of the new symphonies for a charity concert.
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